I've never been one to make New Year's resolutions. I think they're made to be broken and cause disappointment. But I have definite steps to world domination I want to achieve this year:

-Stay the hell off social media. Not forever, mind you, but just....be on it less. I found that it was crowding my brain a bit too much in 2016.
-Maybe finally move this blog onto another platform? I want a more professional look. Maybe. I'll probably change my mind in about five minutes.
-Finish the Victorian novel and get started on the second draft (finishing the second draft would be nice, too, but let's not push it)
-Send "Haunted Lake" to a beta and figure out what to do with it (I'm leaning towards finding a magazine to submit to)
-Draft and finish "The New Bride of Banner's Edge," which is more Regency romance than historical fiction. I've started the first draft and I think it'll be novella length.
-Get back into the research I had done for Pearl and draft her brother Julius's story.
-Interspersed with other things as time and attention allow

As for the IWSG January question:

What writing rule do you wish you'd never heard?

Erm...sometimes all of them?

I've heard and read a lot of ridiculous writing rules over the years, but I can't think of anthing specific as the one absolute one I wish I'd never heard. Once you hear something, you can't un-hear it, but it's fairly easy to tune it out when you're in the thick of writing.

Like, for example, in 2016, I wrote a 150 page long fanfiction--I wasn't worried about much beyond writing witty dialogue, shaping the characters (which was easy when you're directly writing other peoples' personalities down), and making sure it was coherent but fun because I was only sharing it with my two best friends. They've been forced to read my writing for nigh on fifteen years now. And I had a blast writing that one.

The one short story I finished during NaNo 2016, "Haunted Lake" is pretty outside of my usual writing grooves: it's short, it has limited characters, it's set in the present and the eighteenth century, and it's horror. There are ghosts and creepiness. I had a ton of fun writing it.

So I think I need to shed that college writing course skin of "write things that are more literary" and just write whatever the hell excites me.

Comments

Haha, you're answer to the question is the first thing that popped into my head. ^_^ You gotta write whatever you want! It's so much more fun that way anyway. I'm looking forward to the short story! ^_^

I think it took me about to year to move my blog over, after I already set everything up. I'm like super slow about things. I have a list of goals I want to accomplish this year taped the wall next to my desk. I won't have the excuse of forgetting at least. I'm so rooting for you to get the novel finished!! ^_^

Great goals! I do think social media consumes too much of our time, leaving less for doing something with our own inspiration! It's all about priorities and just like you, I want to reduce my time online and put most of those hours towards writing my memoir.

Yeah, the social media's gotten to a point where it's not even interesting for the most part or I find it ridiculous or histrionic, but I didn't want to pull away--except that it was taking up writing time.

Yay world domination! Happy 2017 and Happy IWSG Day! Sounds like some good goals for the coming year. Social media can be a killer. I like the look of your blog, very bright and cheery and makes me want to smile. :)

Love that line from Pirates of the Caribbean. It's so true.Used to be on Weebly before I moved my blog to Wordpress. But then Weebly didn't have this function to easily transfer my blog posts to WP. So had to it manually by copying, pasting and backdating two years worth of blog posts. If you're going to move blogs, think about if you'll be starting anew. Or if you want to move your old posts over to the new site. If you want to do the latter, research on how you can transfer your posts.

It doesn't seem that hard to move posts over from Blogger to Wordpress, but Wordpress is a lot more technical and for the kind of site I'd want, I'd have to pay for it. So I think I might want to stick to Blogger for a bit longer.

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